API call to get estimated shipping cost - ebay shipping calculator

[thereandback864]

Is there an API call to get the equivalent result of the ebay shipping calculator ?

I want to get the total estimated cost for selling an item, including shipping. So not what the buyer would be charged, but the estimated cost of shipping to the seller. Getting estimated listing fees isn’t a problem, but it seems like estimated shipping fees aren’t readily available. 

All the calls I’ve tried in the explorer just seem to show what the cost is to the buyer, as opposed to what it is likely to cost the seller. There is a new logistics API, but it’s restricted and it seems more destined towards actually purchasing labels, so it requires the full name and address when generating a quote.

It seems like what I would need is api access to the shipping calculator, but I don’t see documentation. 

I purchase and print labels on eBay, but I guess I could always try and pull a 3rd party estimate and approximate it to what eBay charges. 

[shipscript]

I don't know if this can be done within an eBay API, but wanted to make a general observation.

Without a destination, any shipping estimate will be a stab in the dark.  When eBay started putting shipping estimates in the web listing tool, everyone complained that the cost range was so broad as to be useless (worse in the UPS/FedEx columns).  If you were to get this working, you would need to add a dummy zip or two and would still miss the outliers. 

All three carriers have their own APIs for extracting shipping costs, although their commercial rates may not match eBay's deep discounts. While the USPS rates will be somewhat simpler, based only on package specs and zone, the UPS and FedEx rates can include all sorts of origin and destination adders, like residential, remote, or area surcharge.

[fab_finds4u]

https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/shipping-items/setting-shipping-options/using-shipping-calculator?...

There's  a shipping calculator in the link you can use before creating your listing, to research what it might cost to send to different locations.

[thereandback864]

I understand what you’re saying and yes there will always be outliers so it’s possible it may not be worth the effort but I was hoping to at least be able to experiment with it. If there is no programmatic resource though, then I’ll continue to use the a more generalized approach. Thanks for your answer

[little_bear_collectibles]

I'm a seller who codes his own API, so I see both sides of this equation. It's actually pretty shameful that this doesn't exist.  Professional sellers who might have hundreds even thousands of SKUs can't be callin' up the shipping calculator page each time we want to set the price for a new item, nor do the same when costs of sales change and we want to recalculate our prices, for every SKU in our inventory.  That's all we would do all day long is change prices.  Years ago when I first solved this I created a lookup table that I have to change every time shipping costs change, and now that eBay is finally using cubic I'm thinking well now maybe they've fixed this.  But no.  I need  my API application to be able to calculate the final cost to the customer for free shipping items so that I can adjust the price to a sustainable profit margin. This lowers the cost to the customer and makes sure that I don't lose money. Ebay still has the corporate mindset that its sellers are hobbyists and not professionals.  Professional sellers need to be able to calculate a worst-case fulfillment cost for a given SKU so that the API can work that cost into the price without having to go through a ritual. In this age of inflation and even a little deflation as prices adjust out, prices change quarterly even monthly. It seems like no one at eBay has contacted professional sellers and asked, what can we do to lessen your busywork so that you can spend more time expanding your eBay store?  They wonder why sellers stop selling on eBay and just go to Amazon when they start to require a more professional platform. Fundamental basic things like efficient cost estimation are just missing here.  Now it's even more complicated with cubic. After taking wayyyy too longgggg to implement cubic,   I should be able to lower prices now that it has finally arrived. Cubic efficiently competes with Amazon FBA fulfillment costs.  I either have to figure out a way to estimate the fulfillment cost in my app outside of the API, or just leave my prices where they are.  I should be able to call the API to return the worst case shipping cost of an item. I'm in San Diego, I should be able to return the cost of shipping one to Maine.  I add that cost to the other costs, the ones that my app knows, and calculate a price with my preferred margin.  When the cost of fulfillment change, either up or down, that API call will return a different number.  My app determines that the margin has changed and adjusts the price back to the set margin.  You let us set the price through the API but then force us to do it blind as to the fulfillment costs.  The solution is -- guessing?  If I have to guess I'm going to guess high and that keeps prices up.  Basic stuff, eBay, basic stuff.

[shipscript]

@little_bear_collectibles 

If you are already working with your own API, have you considered working with the carrier APIs?  It would seem that eBay doesn't need to reinvent what the carriers have already provided.  As my handle implies, I used to create shipping scripts for sellers long before eBay had their own shipping calculator, so I know this is possible. That project closed over a decade ago and I no longer keep up with the carriers (sorry, no help here), but I don't suppose today's carrier APIs would be any more difficult that eBay's current APIs.